Establishing a Crafty Making Future: What Does a Career in Craft Look Like Today?

This chapter outlines the diversity of ways that project participants have developed and structured their working lives and enterprises. Within these conversations we will gain an understanding of the range of people, personal acumen, skills, and public and private investments that are garnered by these creative entrepreneurs to develop and sustain their practices. Through the lens of Milanesi’s three forms of ‘passion entrepreneurship’: lifestyle, accidental, and hybrid entrepreneur (Milanesi 2018, p. 425), why makers pursue this work, despite the often relatively low levels of income to be derived from creative self-employment, is explored. The chapter concludes with a reference listing of some of the key practical advice offered by the research participants.

Vocabulary Learning and Consolidation with Mobile Application

Language learners at all levels need a way of recording and organising newly learned vocabulary for consolidation and for future reference. Listing words alphabetically in a vocabulary notebook has been a traditional way of organising this information. However, paper-based notes are limited in terms of space (learners often run out of space for certain categories; for others the space might be unused) and time (handwritten pages deteriorate over time and cannot easily be updated). Organizing vocabulary in more meaningful categories might make it easier to learn. Textbooks, for example, often introduce new vocabulary thematically. Words can also be organised according to their grammatical class or characteristics, their real world category (e.g. modes of transport, means of communication), their phonological pattern, their etymological elements, or according to when/where they were learnt. This research experiments how the mobile learning of a lexical spreadsheet can be used for the consolidation of and reference to new vocabulary. Offering the learner multiple ways of organising vocabulary at the same time – combining all of the approaches mentioned above, the resource can easily be modified and updated. Importantly, in keeping with autonomous learning theory, the spreadsheet is designed to encourage learners to take more responsibility for their own vocabulary learning and to approach this process more systematically. The resource can be used from any mobile smart phone, tablet or i-Pad.